Senate to look at Mozilla's browser competition allegations

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee plans to look into accusations by Mozilla that Microsoft is restricting access to important programming tools for browsers that will run in Windows RT.

From Computerworld:

Last week, Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, said Microsoft was withholding access to APIs -- application programming interfaces -- that Mozilla considers crucial for building a browser that can compete with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on ARM devices.

Although IE10 will have access to those APIs in Windows RT, rival browsers, including Firefox, will not. Mozilla argued that access to the Win32 APIs were necessary to develop a version of Firefox that could render JavaScript quickly, as well as to isolate plug-ins and tabs to make the browser more secure from exploits and more stable overall.